CHAPTER ELEVEN

Old Tales

We had washed up on the other side of the river, the Fenlen side. As we walked, the sun sank low and as the earth cooled, a mist had risen. I did not think we had gone so far, or even that we had been out for so long. But now, somehow, it was late. We stood still, both thinking the same thing. Night would fall and there was no way of getting home.

“Melina is going to be mad,” I said.

He looked at me sharply. “Go mad?”

“She’ll be angry,” I clarified.

“Ah.” He nodded. “Yes. And worried.”

We lapsed into silence again. There was nothing to be done.

His hold on my hand tightened a little. “We should find some shelter.”

The river was to our left, so we went right, stumbling over rocks until we found the face of the escarpment.

“We should not be here,” Torun said. I said nothing. He was right—being lost in a forest at night made it harder to find your way out in the daytime.

We turned and walked a little. Torun stopped suddenly in front of a boulder. He dropped my hand.

“This is the place,” Torun said.

“What do you mean?

“This is where we met.”

“How can you be sure?” It looked like any boulder shaggy with moss.

“This is the rock on which I sat. After Bettina, I ran. This is where I stopped. If I went farther…” He took me around the side of the boulder and rubbed some moss away to reveal shallow, worn away lines in the rock face. The curves of eyelids, hollowed out pupils, a natural slash forming the mouth. “This is where people say the Alvina set their borders, according to the old stories. Melina told me if I crossed over, I would be lost.” He shivered beside me. “If I believed in stories and in bad luck, this would be a sign. But I don’t believe. Come on.”

From the side of the boulder that was nearest to the forest, we made an arc southward. He seemed to know where he was going, even in the mist. Beside the boulder were a series of smaller stones curving south, like an arm. The last was slightly larger, a lump with a long extension pointing south, like a finger. I had not noticed any of these signs the first night—they had been obstacles underfoot, nothing more.

I saw another arm made of raised stones, pointing towards the forest. I wanted to follow it but went after Torun with hesitating steps. We were going south, along the ridge. I breathed in deep and my nose filled with the tang of rot, the same as I smelled when we fell from the cliff face. About ten paces down the path, there was another boulder. A hole for a mouth. Two slanting, suspicious eyes, the outline of a nose.

To our right lay another boulder, another face. The mist hid much from my eyes, but the path underfoot became wider, rockier, until it disappeared into a pile of rubble. We turned.

And there, shoulder high, was a break in the cliff face, revealing the snarling dark maw of the earth. Above my head were two holes carved out for eyes, two smaller ones for nostrils. The rocks were yellowed, and as I came closer to the cave, the colour deepened to an orange-red, like a huge, outspread mouth. The air reeked of sulphur. But the soles of my chilled feet warmed in the dirt. I curled my toes into the grit. It was as if the heat were coming from the ground.

“We shouldn’t go close,” Torun said.

“What is this place?”

“Alvina birlan. People go here to disappear.” He opened his mouth as if to say more, but then fell silent.

Did this have something to do with her? I could not ask directly.

“It isn’t safe, but we’ll be warm from the breath of the cave.” Torun sat down and crossed his arms over his raised knees. I settled a few safe feet away. It was too dark to pick wood for a fire and we had no flint or tinder anyway. But the rocks were heated by the bowels of the earth, and the soil was a rich and crumbling red streaked with veins of black.

“What is Alvina?” I asked.

“Not what. Who. It depends on who you ask. Some people say they are the old people who live in caves under the forest.”

“Oh,” I said. “Like the Old Folk?”

“What ‘Old Folk?’”

“Well…” I began. Heat began to gather in my chest. “Never mind.”

“No. Tell. What do you mean ‘Old Folk?’”

“A kind woman told me stories about them when my father disappeared.” I picked up crumbs of ruddy earth and ground them between my fingers. “She said they lived in the forest and lured away lonely travellers.”

The corners of his mouth gave a skeptical twitch. “I did not think you are the person who believes those stories.” The smile faded, and he dipped his chin to his chest. “You thought I was Alvina?”

“Well, I don’t know!” I felt queasy with embarrassment. I had never thought to ask Torun more about the place into which I had come. “Well, then, what are you?”

“Verian. Like you are Gersan,” he said simply, like he was sorting out chickens from geese. “That is our people’s name. Our language. But there are not many of us. If you go further east, people start talking Philistre. That’s what the queen and her ministers speak.”

Of course, Torun and Melina were not magical…they were just different. But I felt stupid for not knowing anything about this place and these people. There was no hiding my ignorance now.

At the sight of my mortified face, Torun broke out laughing and then stopped abruptly. “Thinking as you did, you let me…lure…you? You thought I might be a dangerous creature and you came anyway?”

“Just at the beginning! I was lost and then suddenly you were there. Then the house in the tree…and it was all mixed up with”—I did not say Bettina’s name—“and then I find Pa. After being just…gone…for so long.” I hated saying such things aloud. The hurt felt like it should belong to another version of me.

The silence stretched out.

“So, if you thought I was Alvina, Melina would be the Alvina woman who has kept your father from you. If we were magical creatures, your heart would not hurt so much?”

Worse and worse. “It made a sort of sense at first. For why he never came back for my mother.” My pulse was beating hard in my neck. I had never wanted to admit these things, even to myself. “My mother is beautiful, I think.” It sounded so foolish; most girls thought their mothers were beautiful, if only in the vain knowledge that they would one day resemble them. Ma was forceful, that was closer to the truth, and I resented and admired her for it in a way Pa evidently did not. “No…Ma is strong. Somehow, he had just walked away from her.” And from me.

“Hmmm.” Torun looked at me askance. He had insisted yesterday that he was not trapped here, that he chose to stay. But I felt trapped, and not only by Sida’s absence. I did not like having him look at me and know these things.

“Anyway, then I thought you could help me find Sida and not much else mattered after that.” I looked up and around at the gaping cave mouth, where the shadows gathered. “Well,” I said. “You are not Old Folk. I know that. And I am not Alvina. You know that.” There was an uncertain pause and I pushed through it. “What are the Alvina, then? Who?”

“There are different types of stories,” Torun said slowly. “Some people say that there was once a city here, hundreds of years ago. When our folk arrived, there was a battle, and the Alvina, the people who lived here, took refuge in a cave and never came out. And these stone faces are all that is left.”

I looked up at the mouth of the cave. “And is this the place where they went underground?” I was beginning to understand why he didn’t want to go any further.

“Maybe.”

This story made sense to me. One of Victor’s books, The History of the Kings of Gersa, described great carvings of chalk made in the hillsides of West Gersa, depicting bears and wolves. The book said they were left by giants; Ma said the carvings were left behind by earlier tribes whose names we had forgotten.

“In that story, either the Alvina found another world below the forest, or they are the ghosts of the dead and take revenge on our folk. We live in the trees, some old people say, to trick the Alvina. If they cannot find us, they cannot bring us bad luck. But they can be appeased with gifts of milk and bread and honey cakes.”

I shivered. The lamb-girl…who looked like…who might be Bettina…had offered me just those things. But Torun wasn’t done.

“Other people say that the Alvina were cruel to the forest and cut down sacred trees. Then Earth Mother became angry and swallowed the city. The cave is her mouth. The forest took back what was hers. They say the uksarv guard the forest and the Alvina, in punishment, must guide souls between the lands of the living and the dead. For us, everything on this side of the river belongs to the dead.”

I shivered. “Is that why you don’t graze your sheep there?”

Torun shrugged. “That’s why we’re the only house this far out. The grazing is good, but the other shepherds like to give the forest space. This place is so wild, they say, that the uksarv cross the river into our lands.”

“But that doesn’t explain…” I fell silent. How could I explain what had happened to me? “But there is something strange about…”

“About what? A cave that stinks of death?” Torun seemed oddly agitated. “Maybe this is just a place where people run away from life. Do you see a great king’s city?”

I saw great boulders everywhere. There wasn’t a city, but there wasn’t anything that prevented me from imagining one here, either. I thought of the slash of autumn I had seen, the scream. What about the strange girl I had met in the forest so many years before? I thought about the impossible fact that Bettina and I were the same age, that Pa had walked back in time when he crossed the forest.

But Torun pressed on. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“You know the tales well for someone who doesn’t believe in them.”

“You don’t have to believe in a joke to find it funny.”

Don’t you? I thought. Don’t you have to want to believe, just a little? But to say so would have made him clamp down on what he thought and said. Instead I asked, “How do you know the stories?”

“When I was little, after my parents died, I lived with Melina’s parents. Her father told me stories when he taught me to herd. That was before your father came.”

“Do you wish you were back there?”

He shook his head. “The old man’s dead. He was good to me. The old woman…well, you’ll meet her sometime.” He didn’t seem particularly happy about the idea. “The stories were good for me then. I needed them because I thought the Alvina made life better. Put out a honey cake for them and you have a good lambing season. But there’s no such thing,” he said bluntly. “There is just the world that we live in. Magic might belong to the trees and to the animals, but it does not belong to humans. Otherwise,” he snapped a twig in half and threw it away from him. “Otherwise, things would be different.” He visibly retreated into himself, shoulders pushing inward and up, chin tucking down.

It was a long, silent night.